Report by Carlos Rodríguez Otero and Monty Powell
On Saturday 2 May 2026, a group comprising medievalists, musicians, musicologists, liturgists and art historians met in Room 2 of the Taylor Institution Library for a workshop on Medieval German Drama, organised by Henrike Lähnemann, Carlos Rodríguez Otero, Monty Powell and Sharang Sharma. The event centred on an ongoing project to publish the late Peter Macardle’s reconstruction of the liturgical music in the late-medieval Frankfurt Passion Play (Die liturgischen Gesänge der Frankfurter Dirigierrolle und des Frankfurter Passionsspiels, under contract with Open Book Publishers), more specifically focusing on scenes from the life of Mary Magdalene, arguably the play’s most interesting and multifaceted character.
The play, which we know to have been performed from the early fourteenth century onwards if not earlier, included Latin chants to punctuate the drama, imbuing the Middle High German text with strong liturgical resonances. The surviving sources, however, preserve only the play’s text (principally, the Frankfurt Passion Play of 1493 and other regional versions) and condensed performance instructions (i.e. the mid-fourteenth century Frankfurt Director’s Roll). Only a small fragment of what was once a complete version survives, with both text and music intact.
Play Manuscripts
- Frankfurt Director’s Roll (Dirigierrolle): Frankfurt a. M., Universitätsbibl., Ms. Barth. 178 (Bartholomäusstift, 1st half 14th cent.)
- Frankfurt Passion Play: Frankfurt a. M., Stadtarchiv, Barth. Bücher VI 63, Bl. 1r–81r (Bartholomäusstift 1493)
- Frankfurt Easter Play fragment: Frankfurt a. M., Universitätsbibl., Fragm. germ. III 6 (1st half 14th cent.)
- Alsfeld Passion Play: Kassel LUB, 2o Ms. poet. & roman. 18 (15th cent. with additions up to 1517)
- Trier Marian Lament & Easter Play: Trier StB Cod. 1973/63 4o (Mid-15th cent.)
As Henrike Lähnemann mentioned in her introduction, Macardle had painstakingly obtained scans and photocopies of the play’s approximately 120 liturgical chants for a full reconstruction with text and music, building on his 2007 edition of the St Gall Passion Play. Central to Macardle’s approach was the importance of working from local liturgical sources, the sonic components of Christian liturgy in the Medieval West being significantly contingent on local traditions. Fortunately, a significant collection of late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century chant books written in and for the Bartolomäusstift in Frankfurt survives, where the play originated in mid-fourteenth century. (It would also have been performed immediately outside this former Augustinian collegiate church, the cathedral of the city, in the town square.) Having been entrusted with the manuscript for its posthumous publication, Henrike Lähnemann brought Carlos Rodriguez Otero, Monty Powell and Sharang Sharma into the project to assist with the transcription of the play’s chants, as found by Macardle in these local sources, as well as to situate Macardle’s work among the subsequent research on medieval German passion plays.
The music for the Frankfurt Passion Play, as recorded in the Director’s Roll, primarily consists of chants from the Office and the Mass, which, as Carlos Rodríguez Otero explained, Macardle located in graduals, antiphoners and a sequentiary belonging to the Bartolomäusstift (apart from a later gradual, nevertheless from the Archdiocese of Mainz), now kept in the Frankfurt Universitätsbibliothek. These sources, written in a late gothic musical script known as ‘Hufnagel’ (nails for horse shoes) notation, preserve the chants as they would likely have been known to the play’s late fifteenth-century audience. As Carlos and Sharang Sharma—the two musicologists on the team—learned, this notation has its own quirks, which has prompted fruitful discussions with several members of the musicological community. The most pressing for the purposes of publication was the presence of quilismas (or quilismata), symbols of unclear and contested meaning which appear in these late sources in unexpected ways, requiring a decision regarding their transcription.
Sharang Sharma, who specialises in digital resources for medieval chant research, discussed the new tools that developed since Macardle ceased work on this project in 2013, which have formed an indispensable component of the project. He began by explaining the team’s choice of musical font with which to engrave the musical transcriptions, Volpiano, a typeface that converts music into alphanumeric strings, enabling comparison between chants and large-scale analysis. Its compatibility with Microsoft Word, xml or any other text-based software, the ability to search for specific musical passages, and its Open Source ethos made it the ideal choice. Closely related to this is the Cantus Database, a central body of regional chant databases that include melodies and chants for the Mass and Office, which includes 7,000 manuscripts, 660,000 chants, and integrates the Corpus antiphonalium officii (CAO) numbering system, which identifies office texts and was used by Macardle to catalogue the play’s chants. As well as allowing us to look specifically at German sources that have been indexed, and even typeset with Volpiano, Cantus provides a platform with which to share our own transcriptions later on.
When this became clear, the team wrote to Margot Fassler, whose helpful advice guided the project and, fortuitously, led to her eventual presence at the workshop as an honoured guest and speaker. As well as the issue of quilisma, which traces its origins to the beginning of the chant tradition in German-speaking lands (in sources such as the Hartker Antiphoner from c. 1000), there is also the question of recitation chants, such as gospel tones and passion tones, indicated in the text by verbs such as ‘clamare’, which requires engagement with other plays from the Hessian Passion Play tradition (Alsfeld, Heidelberg, Fritzlar, Friedberg, Trier, etc.), consultation of modern chant sources, and indeed an element of reconstruction.
List of musical sources used for reconstructing the musical chant, all Frankfurt University Library
- Sequentiary (Frankfurter Sequentiar): Ms. Barth. 49 (Bartholomäusstift, mid-15th cent.)
- Antiphoners: Ms. Lat. qu. 48 (Bartholomäusstift, mid-15th cent.) and Ms. Barth. 94 (Bartholomäusstift, mid-15th cent.)Frankfurt UB lat. qu. 48 / Barth. 94 (Bartholomäusstift, mid 15th cent.)
- Graduals (archdiocese of Mainz, ‘Moguntinum’): Ms. lat. qu. 44 (Bartholomäusstift, 2nd ¼ 15th cent.), Ms. Leonh. 13 (c. 1525 from St Leonhard)
The character of Mary Magdelene was of central prominence during the day. In the Frankfurt Play she has nearly as many scenes as Christ (more than Mary the Mother of God) and she undergoes the most significant change throughout the narrative. This is even reflected in the staging, with her initially appearing on the West side of the square (representing Hell), and later moving to the East (Heaven) after her conversion. Within the Hessian play tradition, embellishments are added to her story (a lover, taunting devils…) that are of musical interest as well, involving vernacular song.
Margot Fassler explored this with reference to the longest chant of the play, a sequence written for her (‘Laus tibi Christe’) bv Gottschalk of Limburg (or of Aachen) in the late eleventh century. The malleability of her character, resulting from the unclarity of exactly who she is in the gospels, made her a popular and versatile saint, with several aspects of her life explored in visual arts as well as liturgical music. In the early Middle Ages, she was also rendered as the sinner in Luke 7 and Mary of Bethany. In the figure of Mary Magdelene, Margot Fassler explained, we have a condemnation of worldly vice (before her conversion), a model penance, and a story of conversion, making her both a universal saint and at the same time a privileged first witness of the Resurrection and ‘apostola apostolorum’. Margot Fassler also highlighted the significance of visual depictions of Mary Magdalene, and how these would enrich a future performing edition project, as well as the role of intertextuality within the sequence repertoire. She pointed out how focussing on the ringdance in the Frankfurt and Alsfeld Passion Play could help as defining feature for a performance version of the Mary Magdalen passages.
Monty Powell then began the more hands-on afternoon session with a paper on the ‘adaptability’ of medieval drama, specifically in the context of the Hessian group of plays from which a large number of full and fragmentary play-manuscripts survive. A number of sources, collated from the Stadtrechnungen and Bürgermeisterbuch of medieval Frankfurt as well as from personal diaries, provide insightful (and sometimes amusing) accounts of the great tradition of putting on Passion and Easter plays in medieval Frankfurt. They also document amajor change that took place in the tradition: before 1480, it seems, plays were performed under the auspices of the Bartholomäusstift, to which context, from more than one century earlier, the Frankfurter Dirigierrolle belongs. After 1480, the plays came under the close control of the Town Council: the manuscript containing the text that Germanists have termed the Frankfurter Passionsspiel was copied in 1493, and contains an (incomplete) play text that has become far less “liturgical” in character but where other scenes have been added and vastly expanded upon. A case in point are the Mary Magdalene scenes: as the afternoon’s workshop showed, the later passion plays from Frankfurt and Alsfeld revel in exploiting to the full not only the comic potential inherent in such a character, but also her importance as a model of penance. This second, penitential aspect of Magdalene’s character had been demonstrated so wonderfully earlier in the day by Margot Fassler.
It is important to keep in mind that we can never safely map records of historical performance onto the text preserved in play-manuscripts. For instance: although it would be tempting to read Johannes’ Kremer’s 1493 play-text, now known as the Frankfurter Passionsspiel, as an archived version of the performance that we know took place one year before, things might not be quite so simple: is it an archive recording parts of the play performed one year before, or Kremer’s own rewritten version, perhaps intended for future performance – or for his own enjoyment and personal use? And what about its relationship to the plays held in Frankfurt over the following decades, for which no play-manuscriptssurvive? We can ask similar questions about the later Alsfelder Passionsspiel manuscript. Although dates of three performances, along with the content of what was performed when, is recorded on its first folio, the manuscript shows evidence of three scribal hands which cannot always be easily differentiated from one another, and includes added quires and pages stuck in to the manuscript. The point is that a ‘reconstruction’, of music and/or of a whole play, is not quite as simple as we might wish. As Johannes Janota, editor of the Hessian group of plays, argued in his excellent essay Mittelalterliche Texte als Entstehungsvarianten, it is paramount to develop models of editions (in the case of the Hessian group, parallel texts) that do not obscure but make clear (sichtbar) the constant processes of rewriting and adaptation – what Walter Haug called der aktualisierende Vollzug – at work between manuscript witnessesof play-texts, and in medieval literature more generally. By comparing and attempting to perform not just comparable Mary Magdalene scenes from the play-texts, but also their music as reconstructed by Peter Macardle, we hoped that Saturday afternoon’s workshop could make these processes not just sichtbar, but hörbar, too.
The group then divided into pairs and small groups, each exploring possible approaches to different elements of the play in a future English-language performing edition. Questions raised included whether—and how—music might be translated, how faithfully to adhere to original forms and language (both musical and textual), and how to transmit the feel and experience of the play, with its contrasts between sacred and secular, high- and lowbrow, vernacular and learned. The responses were creative, insightful and above all, enjoyable, culminating in a showcase of recomposed folk laments, sensuous settings of courtly and worldly desire, Shakespearean-influenced verse translations and various choreographies, including the Ring Dance, a popular dance type in Medieval Germany that blurred the boundaries between sacred and secular authorities, as well as the mundane and the divine.
The workshop was not only successful, therefore, in introducing the project of publishing Macardle’s edition, but it also demonstrated how his work can inspire a broader, creative engagement with this stimulating and exciting dramatic genre.
